KING�S ROW � Lou Marini, a local auto mechanic that had been missing for several days, told the Paragon City Times that he had been kidnapped by Clockwork robots, and forced to make general repairs to the autonomatons who are consicered a menace to the city. Last Thursday, Mr. Marini vanished without a trace, and shortly thereafter, his wife and daughter disappeared as well.
It wasn�t until a chance encounter with a scavenging band of Clockwork robots by local super hero, Mr. Nowhere, that the first trace of Marini could be found. Mr. Nowhere, who is a leading member of the Freedom Squad, discovered a message etched onto the surface of one of the defeated robots. It was a plea for help by the imprisoned mechanic, and Mr. Nowhere traced the origin of the call all the way to an abandoned sewer junction, where Marini was being held.
After his rescue, Marini told Mr. Nowhere that his family was also being held at an undisclosed location, to insure that the mechanic cooperated with the villainous robots. The Freedom Squad member went to the mechanic�s shop to look for clues to the whereabouts of the man�s wife and daughter, only to find them being held at the shop by an infestation of robots. Mr. Nowhere forcibly disassembled the robots, and rescued the two women.
A grateful Lou Marini offered the hero a free checkup on his vehicle, but the superhero politely refused, stating that he must continue his fight against evil, and also did not have a car. When asked by reporters why the police did not bother to look in the mechanic�s shop after he and his family had gone missing, Officer Davey Siggles said, �They�re always in the last place you look, so we tried to think of where the last place we�d look would be, but they weren�t in the aqueduct, so we regrouped to form a new plan.� Officer Siggles is now on paid administrative leave.
-written by staff reporter Jamie Honck, and appeared in the Paragon City Times on May 21, 2004.
